Hackaday Podcast Episode 277: Edible Robots, A Personal Eclipse, And DIY PCBs To Die For

June 28, 2024 by Kristina Panos No comments

This week on the Podcast, it’s Kristina’s turn to ramble on alongside Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Paul Allen’s Living Computers Museum + Labs is being liquidated at auction after just 12 years of being open to the public. In Hackaday news, the 2024 Business Card Challenge ends next Tuesday, July 2nd, so this is your weekend to shine! Also, you’ve got about two weeks to get your talk proposals in for this year’s Supercon. (Can you believe it’s only four months away?)

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, at which Kristina made a couple of close-but-no-cigar guesses. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a $3 smartwatch that can run Python, and a completely DIY analog tape recording solution. We’ll talk about making your wireless keyboard truly low power, all the steps you can take to produce perfect PCBs at home, and AI in a font. Finally, we talk about the dangers of a curious childhood, and talk about a dotcom hardware solution that could have gone far, given the right business model.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download and savor at your leisure.

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This Week In Security: Kaspersky Ban, Project Naptime, And More

June 28, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 11 Comments

The hot news this week is that Kaspersky is banned in the USA. More specifically, Kaspersky products will be banned from sale in the US starting on September 29. This ban will extend to blocking software updates, though it’s unclear how that will actually be accomplished. It’s reasonable to assume that payment processors will block payments to Kaspersky, but will ISPs be required to block traffic that could contain antivirus updates?

WordPress Plugin Backdoor

A Quartet of WordPress plugins have been found to have recently included backdoor code. It’s a collection of five Open Source plugins, seemingly developed by unrelated people. Malicious updates first showed up on June 21st, and it appears that all five plugins are shipping the same malicious code.

Rabbit AI API

The Rabbit R1 was released to less than thunderous applause. The idea is a personal AI device, but the execution has been disappointing, to the point of reviewers suggesting some of the earlier claims were fabricated. Now it seems there’s a serious security issue, in the form of exposed API keys that have *way* too many privileges.

The research seems to be done by the rabbitude group, who found the keys back in May. Of the things allowed by access to the API keys, the most worrying for user privacy was access to every text-to-speech call. Rabbitude states in their June 25 post, that “rabbit inc has known that we have had their elevenlabs (tts) api key for a month, but they have taken no action to rotate the api keys.” On the other hand, rabbit pushed a statement on the 26th, claiming they were just then made aware of the issue, and made the needed key rotations right away.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 789: You Can’t Eat The Boards

June 26, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls chat with Igor Pecovnik and Ricardo Pardini about Armbian, the Debian-based distro tailor made for single-board computers. There’s more than just Raspberry Pi to talk about, with the crew griping about ancient vendor kernels, the less-than-easy ARM boot process, and more!

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3D Printering: Adaptive Bed Leveling

June 26, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Have you ever read about something and thought, “Gee whiz! Why did I never think about that?” That was my reaction to reading about a feature commonly associated with Klipper called adaptive bed leveling or adaptive mesh leveling. Too bad I don’t typically use Klipper, but it all worked out, and I’ll show you how it might work for you.

What Is It?

Once a luxury, most 3D printers now come with some kind of bed level sensor. The idea is that the printer can probe the bed to determine the shape of the build plate and then adjust the build plate accordingly. So if a particular spot on the bed is 0.5 mm too high, the nozzle can rise 0.5 mm when it is in that area. There are several techniques Marlin firmware uses, including what I usually use: UBL. Some people scan the bed once and hope it won’t change much. Others will do a time-consuming scan before each print.

However, adaptive bed leveling is a bit different. The idea is that the printer only probes the area where the part is going to print. If your print bed is 235 mm x 235 mm but your part is 50 mm square, you could just probe the points under the 50 mm square.

This does several things. For a given number of points, there is less motion, so it should be faster. Also, for the same number of points, you will have a much denser mesh and, thus, a better idea of what the bed is at any given point. You could even reduce the number of points based on the size of the part you are printing.

When you think about it, it is a dead simple idea. What’s not to love? For most print jobs, you’ll have less work for the printer, faster prints, and a denser mesh. But how do you do it?

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Hackaday Links: June 23, 2024

June 23, 2024 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

When a ransomware attack targets something like a hospital, it quickly becomes a high-profile event that understandably results in public outrage. Hospitals are supposed to be backstops for society, a place to go when it all goes wrong, and paralyzing their operations for monetary gain by taking over their information systems is just beyond the pale. Tactically, though, it makes sense; their unique position in society seems to make it more likely that they’ll pay up.

Which is why the ongoing cyberattack against car dealerships is a little perplexing — can you think of a less sympathetic victim apart from perhaps the Internal Revenue Service? Then again, we’re not in the ransomware business, so maybe this attack makes good financial sense. And really, judging by the business model of the primary target of these attacks, a company called CDK Global, it was probably a smart move. We had no idea that there was such a thing as a “Dealer Management System” that takes care of everything from financing to service, and that shutting down one company’s system could cripple an entire industry, but there it is.

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Thanks For The Great Comments!

June 22, 2024 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

Every once in a while, there’s a Hackaday article where the comments are hands-down the best part of a post. This happened this week with Al Williams’ Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?. I guess it’s not so surprising that the comments were full of awesome answers – it was an “Ask Hackaday” after all. But you all delivered!

A technique that I had never considered came up a few times: instead of engraving the front of an opaque panel, like one made of aluminum or something, instead if you’re able to make the panel out of acrylic, you can paint the back side, laser or engrave into it, and then paint over with a contrast color. Very clever!

Simply printing the panel out onto paper and laminating it got a number of votes, and for those who are 3D printing the enclosure anyway, simply embossing the letters into the surface had a number of fans. The trick here is in getting some contrast into the letters, and most suggested changing filament. All I know is that I’ve tried to do it by painting the insides of the letters white, and it’s too fiddly for me.

But my absolute favorite enclosure design technique got mentioned a number of times: cardboard-aided design. Certainly for simple or disposable projects, there’s nothing faster than just cutting up some cardboard and taping it into the box of your desires. I’ll often do this to get the sizes and locations of components right – it’s only really a temporary solution. Although some folks have had success with treating the cardboard with a glue wash, paint, or simply wrapping it in packing tape to make it significantly more robust. Myself, if it ends up being a long-term project, I’ll usually transfer the cardboard design to 3DP or cut out thin plywood.

I got sidetracked here, though. What I really wanted to say was “thanks!” to everyone who submitted their awesome comments to Al’s article. We’ve had some truly hateful folks filling the comment section with trash lately, and I’d almost given up hope. But then along comes an article like this and restores my faith. Thanks, Hackaday!

Hackaday Podcast Episode 276: A Mac On A Pico, Ropes On The Test Stand, A Battleship Up On Blocks

June 21, 2024 by Dan Maloney No comments

The week gone by was rich with fun hacks, and Elliot and Dan teamed up this time around to run them down for everyone. The focus this week seemed to trend to old hardware, from the recently revived Voyager 1 to a 1940s car radio, a homebrew instrument from 1979, a paper tape reader, and a 128k Mac emulator built from an RP2040.

Newer hacks include a 3D-printed bottle labeler, a very hackable smart ring, and lessons learned about programming robots. We also took a look at turning old cell phones into Linux machines, making sure climbing ropes don’t let you down, and snooping on orbital junk with a cool new satellite.

We wrapped things up with a discussion of just how weird our solar system is, and Dan getting really jealous about Tom Nardi’s recent trip to see the battleship New Jersey from an up close and personal perspective.